An education at a private school once provided a guaranteed fast-track to
success. But have university quotas and 'posh prejudice' changed the playing
field?

We blame our parents. If they hadn’t worked so hard and selfishly made all those sacrifices to educate us privately, my wife and I wouldn’t now be struggling to do the same for our children. With fees for the major public schools standing at up to £33,000 a year, it’s the middle-class version of the poverty trap.

But we keep telling ourselves it will be worth it. These schools seem to produce confident, well-rounded people who thrive in a range of professions from medicine, politics and the law, to sport, acting and the music industry. And yet, a nagging doubt. What if our children are discriminated against because, through no choice of their own, they had the privilege of going to a public school?

This is already happening in higher education. Durham and Exeter are among 11 of the 20 elite universities reported to have agreed to Government targets to offer places to bright state school pupils in preference to bright public school ones, even if their grades are lower.

Cambridge is another. This year it managed to reduce the number of students from public schools by 200, with 63 per cent now coming from the state sector. Head teachers at independent schools have called it “Communist-style” social engineering.

Wellington College had 62 pupils who were academically gifted enough to get to the interview stage for Oxbridge this year. When I spoke to Anthony Seldon, the Master of Wellington, he said: “This year we think we will have 20 offers of places. Even so, from our perspective it looks as if some public school students are being discriminated against at the final hurdle. It’s painful because we are seeing some excellent candidates who would go on to get firsts who are not getting offers, about 10 this year. Was that different to when I was at Oxford 35 years ago? Yes. I don’t think anyone gave a toss back then where you came from, only that you were good enough to go.”

Some parents are already playing the system in order to avoid this bias. I was told of a QC with two daughters at St Mary’s Shaftesbury: he took the brighter of the two away when she reached the sixth form and sent her to the local state school instead, so that she would have a better chance of getting into Oxbridge.

I asked the master of an Oxford college (who asked not to be named) what he made of it all. “Every applicant is considered on their own merits,” he said. “But because public school pupils are so well coached, it can be difficult to penetrate their armour and find the person beneath.” Not only do they all come across as confident and articulate, he added, but they all sound the same and give the same sort of clever answers, and after a few days interviewing the next generation of Borises and Daves, tutors crave a Geordie or a Scouse accent.

This chimes with something Tom Mendelsohn, an Oxford graduate, has written in The Independent. He reckons he received “a leg up” from his old school, Winchester, because it “drilled into me the self-possession and knowledge that allowed me to breeze through my interview. Would my place have better gone to someone more dedicated but less oleaginously public school?”

And it seems those former public school pupils who do make it through Oxbridge selection now keep quiet about their backgrounds for fear of being judged. Some have confessed to feeling inferior to state school pupils at their universities, because they’ve been made to feel less deserving of their place. Perhaps there is even a loss of confidence creeping in, which would mark a true turning of the tables.

As one Oxford maths student said to The Times Educational Supplement: “I don’t think I would have got in if I hadn’t gone to private school. My school had Oxbridge sessions twice a week. If I’d been at state school, I don’t think I’d have applied. I don’t think I’d have had the confidence.”

Nineteen-year-old Ben Leibowitz was educated at a London state school and, with straight As under his belt, went up to Cambridge last autumn to read history. Of the seven students doing his course, three are from comprehensives, three from public schools and one was home schooled. He noticed that the ex-public school students play down their backgrounds. His best friend there is a case in point. He seemed perfectly normal, pictures of anarchists on his wall and so on, apart from his reluctance to talk about his past. He would admit only that his school was “by a river”. Eventually, Leibowitz worked out that the river was the Thames and the school Eton. “They seem quite embarrassed about it,” Leibowitz tells me. “As if they suspect they haven’t had to work as hard to get here.”

In December, student pranksters at Cambridge were reprimanded for dressing up in Eton tails to tease candidates waiting for interview. “All my public school friends here were mortified by that,” says Leibowitz, “because it reinforced a stereotype they were trying to move on from.”

What of anti-public school bias in the wider world? The Outer Temple Chambers has been interviewing 384 applications for two places for pupilages. In addition to the traditional categories for assessing applicants, such as whether or not they have a first, a category has been introduced that is designed to favour those lacking a public school education. This considers whether the candidate has overcome difficulties to get into that interview chair, if English isn’t their first language, say, or he or she is from a deprived background.

According to James Leonard, a barrister in the chambers: “It is designed to find that X-factor which is not to do with academic performance, but potential.” Even without this new category he has noticed that public school candidates have become more defensive about their backgrounds. Some put on a neutral voice, but their mellifluous vowels are “like an unfortunate birthmark you can’t quite hide”. This point about the voice is telling. The privately educated comedian Alexander Armstrong told me that in the Nineties he was given the cold shoulder by the BBC because he was seen as being too posh. “It was at a time when the BBC was agonising over its colonial past. We were told, ‘Sorry, we can’t have any more toffs at the BBC.’”

The irony is not lost. It used to be the case that those wishing to rise from the lower orders to the middle would take elocution lessons. Famously, Joan Bakewell claimed that when she went up to Cambridge in the Fifties, she went into a lavatory speaking with a northern accent and came out sounding like Celia Johnson. Now the reverse seems to be happening. Someone at the BBC told her recently her voice is now “too plummy” for broadcast purpose. Boris Johnson was told the same when he was sacked from Radio 4’s The Week in Westminster in 1999. The Today programme stalwart “Posh Ed” Stourton was allegedly given the chop for the same reason in 2008. And the TV presenter Kirstie Allsopp has said of her public school background: “I never disguised my voice, but I was bloody lucky to be called Kirstie. Had I been called Camilla, it would never have happened.”

The Old Harrovian pop star James Blunt, meanwhile, has suffered more than most from a perception he is too posh to be credible. A friend of his once told me that when Blunt signed to EMI in 2002, he bumped into Chris Martin, the Sherborne-educated frontman of Coldplay, who gave him an important piece of advice for surviving with a posh voice in the music industry: “For the first year, don’t let anyone hear you speak.” Would it be acceptable to dismiss someone with a regional accent in the same way? No. But if your pronunciation is received, it seems, you are fair game.

Consider the case of Benedict Cumberbatch. When he said sniping about his public school background and “all the posh-bashing that goes on” frustrated him enough to make him want to live in America, the Guardian’s online comment thread almost imploded with indignation.

The class war prejudice is usually unspoken, though, unless you are Nadine Dorries, the Tory MP who dismissed David Cameron and George Osborne as “two arrogant posh boys”. She has an impeccable working-class background which featured both a council estate and a state school.

“There are some public school and Oxbridge types who have come into the Commons with the latest intake who are complete t----,’” she once told me. “They’re embarrassing.” Example? Her fellow Tory MP Jacob Rees-Mogg, who is Eton-educated, given to quoting Latin and once said: “I gradually realised that whatever I happened to be speaking about, the number of voters in my favour dropped as soon as I opened my mouth.”

Not long ago, Lord Fellowes (of Downton Abbey fame) was watching Loose Women when a participant declared: “I hate posh blokes.” Fellowes noted: “There was a cheer from the audience. If I said, ‘I hate blondes’, or ‘I hate common blokes’, that wouldn’t work.” I know what you’re thinking: you’re thinking, boo-hoo. But it’s strange isn’t it, that in an age of isms – sexism, racism, ageism and so on – the one prejudice people can harbour without feeling they are being nasty and bigoted is, well, what should it be called? Toffism? Poshism? Elitism?

For the moment, the advantages of public school still outweigh the disadvantages. The 7 per cent of pupils who attend public schools, for example, account for more A grades at A-level than the 93 per cent who attend comprehensives. There may be several reasons for this – from smaller class sizes and better discipline, to higher expectations and excellent teaching – but the playing field is more level than you would imagine, because the vast majority of independent schools are non-selective, and the average amount of money spent on a state school pupil each year – £9,000 – is the same as the average yearly fee for a private school.

As for the world of politics, well, every chance he gets the Labour leader, Ed Miliband, reminds us that he went to a state school (even if it was that high-performing one in Camden known as “Labour’s Eton”). Cameron, meanwhile, has become almost painful to watch as he goes to ever-greater lengths to hide his toxic background. It is said that he considered wearing a normal suit for the royal wedding last year, for fear of being photographed in tails.

In a curious way, then, the people who benefited most from public schools now seem to be the ones leading the backlash. Seldon again: “The Conservative Party fell out of love with public schools long ago, largely because Heath, Thatcher and Major weren’t products of them. Cameron is positively uncomfortable about his school.”

And the public at large? “There is a lot of jealousy and hostility toward independent schools. Positive discrimination in favour of state school people has become the hatred that dare not speak its name. That’s why politicians who went to public schools now want to disown them. People use the ladder to get up and then kick it away.”

Well there you go. Tant pis, as we public school types might say. Now, where did I put those forms about remortgaging the house?